The suggested readings about the future of books in the digital age present the idea that we naturally tend to mistrust changes, considering that they have no precedent (the so-called “myth of exceptionalism” mentioned in Price). In Coady’s article, we can see what I believe is one of the most emblematic examples of this phenomenon. She gives the example of Socrates and how he speaks about the risks of the written word, how its discovery could “create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls,” and that “they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing.”

I agree that this bias exists, and I tend to be pretty optimistic about the future of reading with digital platforms. However, I don’t think that the best outcome for these discussions is to condemn these fears (inherent in our survival instincts) but to use them as fuel for our critical thinking about how we incorporate new technologies. 

From one perspective, becoming digital enables access, and not considering this in defense of the physical book is having an elitist and narrow way of thinking. Coady’s article mentioned how the Wattpad (an online, free reading and writing platform) enabled an older adult in a remote village in Africa with no structure that facilitated access to physical books, such as schools and libraries, to read using a mobile phone. Of course, a significant percentage of the world’s population still doesn’t have access to the internet (around 37%). Still, this episode exemplifies how a single piece of online technology can significantly mitigate isolation. 

Adding to this topic-which the articles don’t mention-as digital technologies enable the assimilation of content in different modes, it allows access to readers with physical constraints. Audiobooks, for instance, enable people with visual disabilities to be autonomous in reading. We can say the same thing for illiterate populations or those that don’t have the privilege to have reading time (busy working mothers, for example).

That doesn’t mean, however, that the digital forms of reading are better than physical ones. Print books help us develop focus, critical reasoning, creativity, and many other intellectual properties through a synesthetic experience that the most common digital platforms, such as tablets and smartphones, cannot fully simulate. I agree with Pressman when she argues that the practice of reading physical books has a fetishization component (p. 259) and I agree with Coady when she compares it to a ritual (p. 40). There is something sacred in the reading experience that combines thinking and the senses, including the book’s physicality and all of the physical pleasures of the surroundings. From my perspective, I also think that reading physical books is liberating, since it provides a healthy alternative to having to spend so many hours surrounded by screens. 

To summarize, I acknowledge that the digital has provided many benefits to reading culture, especially regarding inclusion. However, physical books are irreplaceable, brain food that doesn’t depend on having batteries or an internet connection.

Many react badly to change, even when the change isn’t significant. For instance, I work in a tutoring center and computer lab which has audio recording software. Many of my colleagues resist doing recordings in their Communication Studies classes. Never mind that I did recordings for all the languages I took as an undergrad. Granted, I did most of it using tape recorders, and now, we software on computers, regardless, recording students is nothing new, even though how we do it has changed. 

Pressman touches on this on p. 254:

The novel genre no longer needs to be defined by its length or focus on human characters or even such standards expectations as an Aristotelian plot or the coming-of-age Bildungsroman Narrative.

This is not new. The addition of the digital is new, but authors have been experimenting with the narrative, etc since at least the Surrealist Movement in the early 20th century. However, the type of change can be interesting. 

The most interesting example of this in Pressman is the novella Pry (2015) by the collective Tender Claws. This work is an app, and is not structured like the traditional novel. For instance, Pry can’t be printed out and the reader doesn’t turn the page to continue reading. Further, it includes multimedia elements. (Pressman, p. 262) 

While this is innovative and I’m tempted to read ir, to me, it feels like the next generation of the Choose Your Adventure novels. Choose Your Adventure novels are quasi-interactive, in that the reader doesn’t just read the book, rather, they interact with the story by deciding which action to take. 

Pry has increased the interactivity, certainly, involving technology in ways the Choose Your Adventures simply couldn’t. Further, Pry forces the reader to engage with the work differently. For all that the Choose Your Adventure novels did give the readers some choices, but the reader still has to turn the page. The reader has no multimedia parts (well, the ones I read when I was a child didn’t. This may have changed.) to explore. 

Still, Pry feels like the spiritual child of the Choose Your Adventure books, which is interesting because no one would look at the Choose Your Adventure books and say, “Those are great literature.” 

This brings me to the “some reading is better than other” discussion. I have encountered this often in my personal life. For example, I read mostly science fiction, history, and biographies. Many people I know have criticized me for not reading the “great books” (a loaded term in its own right). 

Academics have done studies about the alleged quality of reading material and how it reflects on the readers, such as:

A study in Science in 2013 suggests a link between being able to recognize others’ emotional states and false beliefs after reading prize-winning short stories when this isn’t the case when someone reads “popular” fiction. (Price, pp. 5-6)

I wonder about the validity of these studies. I’ve read many linguistics and education studies which draw conclusions based on spurious evidence. What are the sample sizes? Are various demographics taken into account, such as income and education level? Also, what prizes did these short stories win? What genre of fiction are they? 

Further, what is the point of studies like this? Is it necessary to say some kinds of reading are better than others? On some level, it feels like snobbery. “These are the things I read, and, see, I now have proof that reading those works makes me a better person!” 

I mean, I had teachers who forbade students from reading comic books in class, but many of the comic book reading students didn’t pick up Charles Dickens instead. They just stopped reading. This can’t be the goal. 

In the end, reading has evolved as technology has, while judgment about reading really hasn’t changed. 

Few tropes found throughout the incessantly published analyses of the Digital Age have become more tiresome than the insistence that our present moment comes with the comfort of precedent, that society underwent equivalent upheaval in the wake of Gutenberg’s disruptive contribution, and that the appropriate retaliation to the exploitative and endlessly ubiquitous technocratic structures of power and their “dark mojo,” to borrow Lynn Coady’s reductive phrasing, could be something as simple as “picking up a book” (40). Coady’s Who Needs Books?: Reading in the Digital Age and Leah Price’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Books both advance the notion that to consider otherwise is to fall victim to what Price terms the myth of exceptionalism, relegating contemporary concerns regarding the attention economy, the decline of critical literacy, and the proliferation of what Bernard Stiegler has called systemic stupidity to mere mythical misconceptions, with the added employment of the term exceptionalism to prompt further revulsion to that which falls under the phrase’s conceptual umbrella.

Price’s reliance on recent upticks in physical book sales and the increased popularity of ebooks to counter Nicholas Carr’s Is Google Making Us Stupid? does little to address the diminishing attention and capacity for critical thought that exists at the core of Carr’s piece and countless articles being written with similar unease. Price then endeavors to remove technological advancement entirely from the sightline of this criticism, going on to strictly attribute the general decline in book engagement to financial conditions rooted in the 2008 recession, neglecting the societal and cultural shifts following the release of the first iPhone that began its expeditious trajectory a year prior. The speed at which consumer technology has progressed within this timeframe has led to the global disruption of communities and disindividuation of individuals, the liquidation and commodification of social systems, and the elimination of a sense of political potency and the possibility of a common future, rendering Price’s optimism for the future of reading as simply an ineffectual assertion utterly detached from the declining condition of the reader.

As our will is replaced by automatisms finely tuned to exploit and homogenize our behavior, both digital and corporeal, in service of the market, Coady’s claim that capitalism is “perpetually confused with technology” is equally erroneous. Coady’s unwillingness to recognize the validity of critiques of technoconsumerism such as Franzen’s without reaching for labeling such positions as that of a “misanthropic uncle” mirrors Price’s dismissive tone in terming the unsettling nature of our contemporary moment a myth. Coady’s self-satisfied usage of curated reactionary quotes from history only works to diminish the material reality of the present pervasive exploitation that is the driving force of “digital culture,” making her eventual pronouncement that, “Books are not going away any more than family is going away, any more than community is going way, any more than love and intellectual inquiry are ever going away” all the more exasperating. As Jonathan Cray bluntly notes in Scorched Earth: Beyond the Digital Age to a Post-Capitalist World, “One of the foremost achievements of the so-called knowledge economy is the mass production of ignorance, stupidity, and hatefulness” (83). The drive for intellectual inquiry championed by Coady is swiftly being subsumed into the market through what Stiegler has referred to as the proletarianization of theoretical knowledge, following the same logic of exploitation that television broadcasting did in its proletarianization of how-to-live (savoir-vivre) and the industrial revolution carried out in its mechanization of labor via the proletarianization of how-to-do (savoir-faire). In my view, Coady’s referencing of the fears of the past to some degree works to advance precisely the opposite point of that which she intends to make; capitalism and technology are symbiotic forces, each one working to advance the other, and have existed as such through each stage of proletarianization.

Widespread literacy and engagement with text, either printed or digital, is undoubtedly something to be advocated for. However, it should not be misconstrued as a cure-all solution or final destination. The mnemonic device that is the written word is a pharmakon, capable of acting as a remedy or poison, the latter of which we’ve recently seen the proliferation of in the form of “fake news,” COVID-19 misinformation, and far-right radicalization online. The automatic proletarianization of theoretical knowledge, or the process of our capacity to think critically being replaced by “digital automata” that “bypass the deliberative functions of mind,” leads to the aforementioned state of systemic stupidity, both reflecting and responding to Carr’s question, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” (Stiegler, 2020, p. 16). Coady and Price, in their attempts to champion the form of expression for which their passion is palatable, both, unfortunately, deny the material and noetic conditions at play in the deterioration of engagement with this form, leaving the “singular, magical experience” they romanticize to be further disenchanted by the malaise of the modern digital landscape.

Resources

Coady, L. (2016). Who Needs Books?: Reading in the Digital age. The University of Alberta Press.
Crary, J. (2022). Scorched Earth: Beyond the Digital Age to a Post-Capitalist World. Verso Books.
Price, L. (2019). What We Talk About When We Talk About Books: The History and Future of Reading. Basic Books.
Stiegler, B. (2020). Nanjing Lectures: 2016-2019. Open Humanities Press.

As promised, here are some guidelines and ideas as you do the reading for the next session and write your first blog post. The readings for this week are kind of “meta,” having us read about reading and think about the often-unthought ways that we produce, process, consume, and engage with words. I’d thought to give you a nice prompt that synthesizes the four texts, but I’m finding that approach to be too Procrustean, given the diversity and richness of the different scholars’ approaches.

Instead, I’d like to leave it up to you to draw your own focus on themes and/or texts you find most compelling. For those who, like me, find it difficult to winnow things down and get started, here are some themes you might engage:

• Price argues against what she calls the “myth of exceptionalism” governing our moment of ascendent digital media forms. Pressman also resists declension narratives that assume that our current reading practices represent a degraded version of what we used to do much better in a prior Golden Age of literacy. What do you think? Is Google making us stupid? What kinds of evidence do Price, Coady and Pressman marshal, and what weak spots, if any, do you find in their arguments?
• Liu’s somewhat antique piece (2013) on the shift from Web 1.0 to 2.0 emphasizes changes in the “core circuit” linking authors, readers, and other players in the game of textuality (editors, developers, etc.). How, according to Liu, do these infrastructural changes relate to changes in the literary field? How does “reading” something called “a text” start to mean something different in the era of Web 2.0?
• The readings are delivered to you, as is often the case in the post-Web .- world, variably: two are in .pdf, one is in a proprietary ebook format used by libraries (Ebrary), and one was composed/reviewed/read using CommentPress, a “social reading”-oriented WordPress theme. What are the effects of these different “circuits” we find ourselves in when reading these texts? Where does each position us vis a vis the author and other agents in connecting us to the text? What are some of the “affordances,” the implied ways we are invited to interact with an object (here, a text) at work in each of these examples?

The best posts will:

• be about 500-800 words in length (over is not an issue if you’re in the groove)
• reference the text specifically, with quotes or paraphrases of particular moments in the argument (though not with full-bore MLA style: a page number is sufficient to orient peers to what you’re talking about!)
• have a clear focus, honing in on a particular theme that interests you
• be written in an engaging way, communicating your investment and conveying a sense that what you argue has real stakes

I look forward to reading your work!

This linked CUNY Academic Commons site + group will keep us organized and in close contact this term. If you’re unfamiliar with WordPress and/or the Commons, don’t fret: we’ll work through the onboarding process and any other issues in August and September.

I look forward to meeting/seeing you all in a few weeks!

As I mentioned in class, Thursday we’ll be sharing our experiences/projects, briefly and informally, as we eat, drink, and think about the semester as a whole. For those who feel more comfortable with some parameters, here are some ideas of how to approach this brief assignment (3-5 minutes is ample):

• for essays, give a sketch of the argument
• for objects you’ve built, share a few slides that show what the thing looks like
• talk about interesting materials you dug up in your research
• tell us where you’d like to to take this project in the future, or otherwise how the project might lead to future work (e.g., Kelley has discussed doing Twine games with HS students; Katharina is interested in expanding her project to include all available narratives of Jews displaced from Vienna during the Nazi period)
• talk about failures and frustrations: we don’t do this nearly enough in higher ed, though JITP is a leader
• explore ideas for new projects that working on this project inspired in you

Have fun, and I look forward to hearing about your work next week.

A hearty thanks to Patrick for his excellent tour of text analysis and NLTK in particular. I just wanted to follow up with a couple of notes and links that might be useful to those interested in further study:

• The NLTK Book is one-stop shopping for getting up to speed on the platform and (as Patrick demonstrated several times) quick searches for syntax, etc. even for experienced users.
• The Stanford Literary Lab is an excellent place to sample the kinds of things you can do with text analysis in ways that combine traditional humanistic questions with data-driven answers grounded in the kinds of analysis that computing makes possible, or in some cases, just must easier, than traditional print-based research methods.
• In case anyone was puzzled about Patrick’s references to the cloud over Franco Moretti, the figure most associated with “distant reading” (and a founder of the aforementioned Stanford Lit Lab). He has been accused of truly horrible acts: for those who want to read about it, one of his accuser’s narratives is here.

Katharina asked the very useful question last week, after I suggested that one or both groups might choose a substitute for the planned Billy Budd: what makes for a good text to play via Ivanhoe? Here are some thoughts on that score:

• you can “play” virtually any fictional narrative (or even historical event, legal debate, etc.): as long as there are an array of different personae to inhabit, the play will work.
• shorter is better: in my experience, the game works best in groups of 4-7, to allow for a range of different personae and to give a sense of the text as a whole. As I joked in class, Russian “doorstop” novels have too many characters and too much plot complexity to work well. Novella-length is great, given the time constraints.
• public-domain is always nice but less necessary here: we are transforming these texts and thus can “publish” our work in the open under “fair use.” So the only downside is the expense, potentially, of getting your hands on an in-copyright text.
• interesting publication history: if you dig deeply enough, almost any text has a rich publication history on some level, but it’s nice to think about texts that occasioned some kind of vivid debate, or had unusual itineraries through the publication process, or otherwise teach us something about the production/consumption/distribution of texts.
• As I mentioned in class, the Bedford Cultural Edition series has a few 19thC texts that have rich publication histories, are of manageable length, and are chock-full of the kinds of cultural materials that would enhance your play.

For an example, check out the site in which my honors course at Hunter played Charles Chesnutt’s The Conjure Tales last term. As you can see, both teams played the same text but with different emphases and different “paratextual” characters. The fun of the game emerges through the interactions, in which players, much as in improvised music or theater or dance, have to listen to one another in order for their expressions to mesh with the whole. Of course your play will look very different, but I think these students did great things with the project.